Ask AltoTRY · 12 MIN
Belief vs Behaviour Audit
TAIU
Values are visible in a diary and a bank statement.
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Tool 92 · Develop yourself
Which rules, expectations and definitions arrived before I had a say?
A guided 15 to 19 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Some of what you carry was decided before you arrived. That is worth separating from what you have actually chosen.
GUIDES
You have named it. Now spend some time on it.
Each Guide gives you a clear way to look at one subject in your own time. Choose where to begin. You do not need to work through everything.
What you started with
What arrived before you had a say
List the rules, expectations and definitions that were in place before you could choose.
Where this often ends up: A short list of what you arrived with.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around twenty minutes
Still in use
Which ones you still run on
Work out which of those rules you still live by, and where they show up.
Where this often ends up: The inherited rules you still use, with where each one shows.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around thirty minutes
Keeping and leaving
What you would choose again
Decide which of these you would keep, and whether any are worth setting down.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around twenty minutes
This Guide is free, like everything else in The Clearing.
You can see what it covers before you begin.
Start this GuideWhere a rule came from is not an argument for or against keeping it.
Gratitude does not require continuation.
Would you choose it again, knowing what you know now?
What you'll look at
- 01Where it came from
- 02What normal meant
- 03Whether it still fits
- 04What you would keep
A note from Mark
People often talk about their background as though it explains everything or nothing. It usually does neither.
Before anybody makes a decision, a lot has already been decided. What was normal, what was showing off, what money was for, what people like you were supposed to want.
None of that arrives with a label. It just feels like how people are, until you meet someone whose normal was completely different.
Origin and ownership are different questions. Where a rule came from doesn't settle whether it should stay. I've watched people keep an inherited rule for entirely new reasons, once they had actually looked at it.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
Where it came from
02
Whether it still fits
03
What you would keep
04
What follows
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01Where this came from
- 02What normal looked like
- 03Why it made sense there
- 04Whether it still fits
- 05What you would keep anyway
- 06What you are carrying without having chosen it
- 07The rival reading
- 08Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
Where this came from, in specific terms.
02 · Test it
Name one rule about money or status you have never actually examined.
See more ↓
What I would do
- 01
Name the rule in specific terms rather than a general feeling about your background.
- 02
Ask where it came from before asking whether it is right.
- 03
Separate gratitude for the people who gave it to you from an obligation to continue it.
- 04
Test whether it still fits your life now, not the life it was built for.
- 05
Let some of it stand unchanged if it genuinely still holds.
Test it
- 01
What was normal where you came from?
- 02
Why might it have made sense there?
- 03
Does it still fit now?
The alternative
The usual reading is that examining an inheritance means rejecting it, and that anybody who questions where they came from is ungrateful or embarrassed by it. Often the evidence shows the opposite. Somebody looks closely at a rule about money, or status, or what people like them are supposed to want, works out exactly why it made sense for the people who handed it to them and decides to keep it anyway, now for their own reasons rather than inherited ones. The reverse also happens. Somebody discovers that a rule they assumed was simply true was in fact local to one house, one town, one decade and it stops being a fixed feature of who they are.
Think about this
- What was normal where you grew up, that you now know isn't normal everywhere.
- What you were taught about money, class, ambition or restraint, said out loud or simply absorbed.
- What conditions might have made a rule sensible where it came from.
- Whether it still fits the life you are living now.
- What you would keep anyway, knowing what you know now.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Want to go further?
Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
What patterns did I learn from my family?
If the inheritance sits mostly inside one family
Further thinking
The Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel
Morgan Housel on getting rich versus staying rich
Shane Parrish with Morgan Housel
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
See the thinking ↓
Book
The Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel
Housel's argument is that financial behaviour is mostly not a maths problem. People handle money according to what they lived through, what they saw at home and what they are frightened of. Read it for the chapters on enough and on wealth being the money you do not spend, which are the two ideas this exercise keeps running into.
Podcast
Morgan Housel on getting rich versus staying rich
Shane Parrish with Morgan Housel
A long conversation rather than an interview, and it spends most of its time on the part people skip: the difference between the behaviour that builds money and the behaviour that keeps it, and how much of both is inherited from the household you grew up in. Listen to it if the exercise turns up a childhood money story you had not thought about since.
Book
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
Haidt argues that moral judgement arrives first and the reasoning follows, assembled afterwards to defend a position already taken. That is uncomfortable reading if you believe you arrived at your worldview by thinking it through. It is also the single most useful corrective when you sit down to describe what you actually believe, because it makes you look for the origin of a conviction rather than only for the argument supporting it.
Book
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Erving Goffman
Goffman watched ordinary social life the way somebody watches a play, and found that all of us run a front stage and a back stage. The front is not a lie. It is the working version of ourselves that a situation requires. Reading him takes most of the moral charge out of the question, and leaves a far better one behind: which of your performances is worth the effort it costs.
Book
A Secular Age
Charles Taylor
Taylor's account of how the West moved from a world where belief was assumed to one where it is one option among many is long and demanding, and worth it. It explains why questions about what you hold true now feel like personal decisions rather than inherited facts, and why so many people find they cannot answer them without borrowing somebody else's vocabulary.